Matt Helm Week: The Wrecking Crew!

Despite some nice moments, The Wrecking Crew is probably my least favorite of the Matt Helm movies. It was directed by Phil Karlson, who also directed The Silencers, and its main problem is that repeats a lot of bits from the first movie. For example, Matt is introduced here through another dream sequence where he fantasizes about the models he's photographing.

However, here, the models are just standing around while he takes his nap. Huh?

There's also a line in one of the songs about "a cow that gives scotch." That's just too much.

The plot of The Wrecking Crew involves the theft of $1 billion in gold from a train guarded by ICE agents. Matt is brought in by the president himself to find the missing gold in 48 hours, before the markets get wind of the loss and a global financial collapse occurs. ICE is pretty certain that Count Contini (Nigel Green) is behind the theft, but they need to find the location of the gold, and Matt is sent to interrogate Contini's disgruntled ex-lover, Lola Medina (played by Gilligan's own Tina Louise).

Lola, however, is killed by an exploding scotch bottle while preparing Matt a drink, once again reinforcing the series' ambivalent attitude toward alcohol.

One of the film's major weaknesses is the presence of Sharon Tate as Helm's bumbling partner, Freya Carlson. Freya is primarily an extension of Stella Stevens's clutzy character in The Silencers, and Tate plays her with little enthusiasm. It is difficult to tell if Tate is a bad actress here, or if she is resisting playing the character as ditzy as the script demands. The script certainly isn't much help, as it requires her to vascillate inconsistently between competence and ineptitude. In the first movie, Stevens, at least, seems to be enjoying herself playing a similar role, and perhaps Tate would have been better off playing a more effective, competent partner like the characters that Ann-Margret and Janice Rule play in the previous two movies. By the end of the movie, it even seems like Dean is getting fed up with her.

Elke Sommer appears as the femme fatale and Nigel Green plays the villain, Count Contini, and next to Karl Malden, he's probably the best villain in the series. He performs the Count as a bored aristocrat who is completely confident in his plan, or "schedule" as he so frequently says with that particular British pronunciation. Both Sommer and Green appeared in similar roles in the 1967 Bulldog Drummond film, Deadlier than the Male, one of my favorite of the Bond knock-offs of the period.

Here's an early meeting between the Count and Matt Helm, which also leads to one of the film's first fights. The camera Matt uses is meant to blind anyone exposed to the smoke.

While The Wrecking Crew may be the worst Matt Helm movie, Dean Martin does kick somebody in the face, so it has that going for it. Also, one of the goons in this scene is played by Chuck Norris, and Bruce Lee is listed as the "Karate Advisor" for the film. All that should make this an awesome film, but it only ends up making it a curiosity.

Mack David and DeVol perform the film's theme song, "The House of 7 Joys," which wins the award for the most culturally uncomfortable theme song in the series, featuring a chorus that contains the line, "Ah so, ah so, welly nice!" Here is a lengthy scene that takes place in "The House of 7 Joys," and it's one of the more entertaining parts of the movie, with a nice pay-off at the end. You also get to see Nancy Kwan as the unfortunately named villain "Yu-Rang."


And finally, here's the fight scene between Sharon Tate and Nancy Kwan. The scene, unfortunately, does not live up to the potential that a girl fight between these two actresses, choreographed by Bruce Lee, should have.


It seems clear to me at the end of this scene that Dean Martin has become impatient with Sharon Tate, as he appears to be treating her a bit rough.

The ending of the movie promises the return of Matt Helm in The Ravagers, but the fifth movie was never made. I'm not sure why the series ended at this point, though it seemed to have run out of steam, and the whole spy craze was coming to an end as well. But, nonetheless, Dino cranked out four of these movies in three years, and they're all loose, fun portraits of their era and perfect vehicles for Dean Martin.

Thanks to everyone who showed up here for Matt Helm Week, especially dino martin peters and rogue spy 007, who provided fun, encouraging comments every day. Check out dino martin peters's I Love Dino Martin blog, which features some great Dinopix in the monthly Dinocalender.

I have some plans for covering other 60s spy movies here in the near future, so keep checking back!

Matt Helm Week: The Ambushers!

The preview to The Ambushers states, "You'll actually see Dean Martin save the world!" The addition of the qualifying adverb "actually" in that sentence indicates that there may be some doubt here, that the event is unlikely or even absurd. However, if anyone was paying attention, we've actually seen Dean Martin save the world twice already. What's to doubt?

The opening credit sequence to The Ambushers features a theme song by Boyce and Hart which implies that women themselves are the true "ambushers." As the song states, women are "like Injuns in the grass ... Then buster, you're General Custer!" I'm really not sure what is worse here: the misogyny or the cultural insensitivity. And, amazingly enough, this is not the most culturally insensitive thing said in a Matt Helm theme song.

The plot of The Ambushers involves the theft of an experimental interplanetary flying saucer developed by the US government and flown by ICE agent Sheila Sommers (Janice Rule). As later explained in the movie by ICE boss MacDonald (James Gregory), the experimental craft operates on the principle of electromagnetism, and "the electromagnetic field has a strange effect on the male of the species--it kills them, dead!" I don't know what about having a penis makes one vulnerable to electromagnetic fields, but I'm not willing to take a chance, either. I think this is one of those circumstances where we just have to accept science without questioning it.

On its maiden voyage, however, the saucer is stolen by the villainous Leopold Caselius, using some kind of ray that shoots out sparkles. Again, I don't pretend to understand science, so I'm just going to accept this at face value.

As is the case with the other Matt Helm movies as well, the opening scenes feature some of the best parts of the movie. The film shifts from the flying saucer abduction to the ICE Rehabilitation Center, where we get to witness the awesomeness of Slaygirls training. The Slaygirls are currently being taught how to use a device that dissolves metal. Such a device would be extremely useful if one of the Slaygirls were faced with a firearm, or if she had to break into a locked door. However, the primary purpose of the device appears to be dissolving the buckle on someone's belt to cause the pants to fall down. And we just know we'll be seeing this device again later.

Another key element of Slaygirls training appears to involve making out with Matt Helm, which shouldn't come as any surprise. Actually, I need to clarify that: the training involves making out with Matt Helm while listening to Dean Martin records! (Interestingly enough, a similar technique was used at the Los Angeles police academy in the early 80s, where female cadets were required to make out with T. J. Hooker while listening to William Shatner's The Transformed Man.)

It turns out that the training isn't solely about making out with Matt Helm; instead, this particular Slaygirl is being trained on the use of a bra gun, which prematurely goes off during the session. To this near-death experience, Helm responds, "When you say you're a 38, you ain't kiddin'!" And then, so as to wring out all the comic potential from this scene, he adds, "An agent should always keep abreast of the times." He does not, however, refer to the bra gun as a "booby trap," as that joke was used to describe Tina's bra holster in The Silencers. The Matt Helm movies are just too classy to repeat the same breast joke.

When Helm leaves that particular training session, he walks out to the quad to find another Slaygirl offering him a ride on her scooter. She warns him, "I go pretty fast--better find something to hang on to!" To which Matt responds by looking at the camera and saying, simply, "Crazy." Clearly, no punchline is necessary, as we all know exactly what he will be hanging on to.

Matt then goes to get a massage from another of the Slaygirls, and during this treatment his assistant, Lovey Kravezit, arrives. Lovey and Matt decide to move their "debriefing" into the steambath. (The subsequent steambath scene, by the way, does a good job of helping me recover from my still-troubling Eastern Promises trauma.) As Matt makes the moves on Lovey by beginning to unclasp her bra, MacDonald's voice suddenly appears. MacDonald has pulled the ultimate spy cockblock by hiding Helm's orders in Lovey's bra clasp. As with the orders hidden in the booze during Murderers' Row, Mac explains that he used this particular medium because he knew this would be the best way to get the orders to Matt.

ICE has connected the theft of the flying saucer with the Dos Equis beer factory in Mexico. The evidence includes a song used in a Dos Equis TV ad that also appears on an album of military marches called "Songs Men Have Died For," which I believe was originally available through K-Tel. I'm not sure how this all fits together, but the beer commercial features women in bikinis, and that's all that is really important in this film.

Matt is then ordered to pose as Sheila Sommers's husband and travel to Mexico under his photographer cover to investigate the Dos Equis beer factory. Really--setting a Matt Helm movie in a beer factory is nothing short of brilliant!

In fact, during a gunfight later in the film, Matt falls into a vat of beer, and he considers the option of drinking himself to safety. And as gun shots miss their targets and hit various tanks and pipes, Matt often gets distracted from the fight by putting his mouth to the spilling beer.

A common occurrence in Matt Helm movies: Matt gets drugged by the female villain (in this case, Francesca, played by Senta Berger, who also starred as the femme fatale in another great 60s spy film, The Quiller Memorandum). Here, it's lipstick instead of booze, but the effect is the same:


Matt Helm also gets some amazing gadgets in this film, including cigarettes filled with laughing gas (which get him out of a firing squad late in the movie), a belt that turns into a sword when it gets wet (!?!?), and a trick camera. One of the better Matt Helm gadgets also appears here: the inflatable spy pad.

I love that this inflatable camouflage tent includes a refrigerator.

The villain, Leopold Caselius (played by Albert Salmi), is not as interesting as Karl Malden's Julian Wall. His plan is to sell the saucer to the highest bidder, and the bidders include the BIG O (represented by Francesca), the Chinese, and an unnamed Middle Eastern nation. The Chinese make the highest bid, leading Caselius to declare, "The first man on the moon will be eating chow mein!"

We also find out here that BIG O stands for "Bureau of International Government and Order," which has to be the least threatening acronym for a global criminal cartel. I have no problems with any part of that name.

Since neither side got the saucer, Francesca actually helps Matt and Sheila defeat Caselius, who is killed when he is trapped inside of the saucer and its man-killing electromagnetic field.

The film ends with Matt Helm engaging in some more "training" for ICE's Slaygirls. Matt explains to his trainee that she may be put into a position where she has to "give herself to the enemy," and he shows her the right way to put herself in the mood for such a duty. He starts, of course, with some Dean Martin music, but this does not seem to help her. He then switches to Frank, and she's ready to go. That is some good stuff right there.

Next: Matt Helm returns in his final big screen adventure, The Wrecking Crew!

Matt Helm Week: Murderers' Row Part 2!

One of the main reasons why Murderers' Row stands above the other three Matt Helm movies is the presence of Ann-Margret. She is clearly the best actress of all the Helm girls (though Janice Rule in The Ambushers is more talented than the role deserves), and she seems to be having the most fun. Her character is also not written as a total airhead who serves as more of a hindrance than a help to Matt Helm, as happens with Stella Stevens in the previous movie and Sharon Tate in the final one.

Here is one of her early scenes which helps to establish her character and shows her wearing an awesome blue feathery night dress.


Another element that makes Murderers' Row the best of the series is its liberal use of hovercrafts, climaxing in an exciting hovercraft chase. The combination of awesome elements--Ann-Margret and hovercrafts--however, reaches its peak in a truly amazing action scene that is the highlight of the series and one of the high points in my entire movie-viewing career.

In a twist that would later be adopted for the movie Speed, the BIG O tries to eliminate Ann-Margret with a bomb that explodes when it reaches a particular speed. Here, however, the bomb is planted in a broach, and it's meant to reach its top speed while she is dancing. The faster she gyrates, ... well, you understand. Her dancing is incredibly frenetic and particularly exhausting to this particular viewer.

Helm, meanwhile, drives a hovercraft through the streets of Monte Carlo in order to reach the discotheque in time to save her. He then rushes into the club and, demonstrating the quick thinking that is characteristic of the super agent, rips the dress off of Ann-Margret and throws it at the wall. (This is also a common trope in the Matt Helm movies, where he is frequently forced to tear off a woman's dress.) The scene ends with a perfect coda: Helm throws the exploding dress at a projected image of Frank Sinatra on the wall, and Matt issues an apology to the Chairman: "Sorry, Frank."

Consistent with the previous film, the gadgets here are typically useless. Helm's car has a scrolling marquee on the back that sends voice-operated messages to anyone following him. And like the backwards-firing gun of the previous film, Helm gets a gun that shoots 10 seconds after the trigger is pulled. What usually happens here: Helm pulls the trigger, nothing happens, and the villain picks up the gun and looks at it, only to get the bullet himself.

Also, the villainous Coco Duquette (Camilla Sparv) has a freeze gun, which first seems only useful for chilling drinks--an essential task in these films--but later Helm uses it as a weapon to freeze BIG O thugs. This is a highly inefficient weapon, as it takes at least 10 seconds to freeze someone.

At one point in the movie, Coco reveals what is clearly Matt Helm's kryptonite: he is easily susceptible to drugged drinks, and this proves to be his weakness in other movies (also of note in the series: drugged lipstick, bombs hidden in bottles of booze). As noted in the last post, drinking is also Helm's "identifying characteristic," and he intentionally gives away his identity by grabbing a drink and kissing Coco.

When finally captured by the villainous Julian Wall (Karl Malden), Helm tries to send his boss, MacDonald, a secret message about an enemy agent that has infiltrated ICE. In order to tip off MacDonald that something is wrong, Helm mentions that he is enjoying a nice glass of bourbon. MacDonald immediately catches the tip, as he knows Helm never drinks bourbon. Therefore, we must conclude that, as often as his alcoholism gets him into trouble, it also saves him.

The concluding hovercraft chase is as exciting as one can imagine, and it must have caused a significant increase in the film's budget over the previous entry. In the end, Matt Helm and Ann-Margret are rescued from their out-of-control hovercraft by MacDonald in a helicopter, and Ann-Margret must, of course, cling to Helm's pants as they are pulled to safety, revealing Helm's cute heart boxers.

Here, for comparative purposes, are the two endings of Murderers' Row and The Silencers, respectively.





As we can see in each case, Matt Helm and his lady both end up wet, so to speak. The ending of Murderers' Row, however, is enhanced by the presence of the Slaygirls, who must spend their time hanging out in Matt Helm's pad waiting for him to come home. It should also be noted that they are still wearing their calender costumes.

And as the finale of Murderers' Row promises, Matt Helm (and Dr. K) will return in The Ambushers!

Matt Helm Week: Murderers' Row, Part 1!

It's been a couple of days, but I'm back, baby, and ready for more Matt Helm action!

Here's a trailer for Murderers' Row, which, as I said before, is my favorite of the 4 Matt Helm movies. This trailer is not included in the Matt Helm Lounge DVD set, but it is representative of the trailers used in this series.

First, in all the trailers, it's apparent that Dean did it in one take, though he clearly didn't quite nail it out of the gate here. Plus, in every preview, Dean's holding a drink in one hand and a cigarette in another, inviting the viewer to come see his new movie. The effect of these previews, therefore, is to blur the line further between Dean Martin and Matt Helm.

The problem I have with writing about Murderers' Row is that the movie is wall-to-wall awesome, and the only way to do it justice would be to liveblog the whole movie. Barring that, I want to hit on some of the many elements that make this movie great.

I would argue that the best part of every Matt Helm movie is the first half-hour or so. During this point in the movie, Matt usually has to make the (reluctant) transition from his photographer day job to the mission. We also get the details of the villain's plot: here, the BIG O, led by Julian Wall (played by an over-the-top Karl Malden) has developed a solar weapon called a Super Helio Beam, which we see destroy a model of Washington, DC.

Wall's plan also involves the assassination of all the top ICE agents around the world (The Japanese agent, code-named "Tempura," is killed by a sponge-bomb while receiving a bath. This scene demonstrates a level of cultural sensitivity that will reach its peak in the final movie, The Wrecking Crew.). As each agent is eliminated, his picture is thrown into a fireplace. Matt Helm's picture, however, only reveals the back of the agent's head, as he is making out with a woman while holding a drink in one hand. The drink is circled and labeled as an "identifying characteristic."

Meanwhile, Helm is engaged in a photo shoot for a new calender, one which features a different state as representative of each month. When we see him, Helm is currently shooting Minnesota in January, and the model wears a fur bikini. Matt positions the model and tells her, "I want to catch you right near ... Duluth." Now, my summary can't really do this line justice, but, suffice it to say, Dean says "Duluth" as if it were the dirtiest word in the English language. Really, the Duluth Tourism Bureau needs to use that line in all their promotions.

Without taking a break, Dean then hits us with another great line when he moves the model again because "we don't want to hide the Twin Cities." I think we all know what cities he's talking about.

I wonder, though, if the writers couldn't have just kept going with this gag. I'm sure, with Dean's delivery, he could have done wonders with Bemidji or Mankato. Or how about, "Move to your left--I want to see Moorhead"? Now, that was a missed opportunity.

This scene also provides the return of Matt Helm's secretary, Miss Lovey Kravezit, who displays the unique talent of being able to take dictation while making out with her boss.

Matt's work, however, proves to be exhausting, and he decides to take a nap while Miss July gets herself ready for her shoot. Matt finds that his rest is hampered by the presence of Miss January in his bed. It turns out that January is the BIG O's assassin sent to kill Matt Helm. The technique she employs is rather elaborate: she activates Helm's automatic bed, which is to send the agent into his Olympic-sized bath tub, where the Helio Beam is shooting down through the skylight. Matt prevents her from escaping, however, and they both slide into the death trap.

Matt Helm is presumed dead, and ICE arranges for his funeral, complete with the Slaygirls all dressed in identical black trenchcoats and hats.

As we can all guess, Matt is not dead, but his death is faked to aid his cover for his mission to stop BIG O's plan for the Helio Beam and rescue the weapon's creator, Doctor Norman Solaris (and with a name like that, you are either destined to make solar weapons or really long, slow-paced Soviet sci-fi movies). Helm's boss, Mac (James Gregory) gives him the mission, and a new cover: "James A. Peters." The intelligence films Matt watches whenever he receives his missions are often not much more than borderline softcore porn, and this one features mainly girls in bikinis on the French Riviera.

Matt arrives in France with his new spy car, and like the one in The Silencers, this is also equipped with booze. However, when Matt opens the bottle to take a swig (while driving, naturally), he instead hears Mac's voice, which explains that this was the best way to ensure that Helm received his orders. Matt laments the waste of "a perfectly good bottle of booze" and then promises, "I'll show you--I'll join the AA!" At least he can admit that he has a problem. But then, he reaches into his inside coat pocket, pulls out a flask, takes a swig, and continues driving.

In one of the movie's more elaborate gags, Matt's investigation takes him to a local discotheque, where the band Dino, Desi, and Billy is playing. This pop band consisted of Dean Paul "Dino" Martin, Desi Arnaz, Jr., and Billy Hinsche (my mom always insisted that "Billy" was the son of Sammy Davis, Jr., and while that would have given the band a nice symmetry, it is not the case.)

Helm awkwardly tries to infiltrate this youth scene by dancing along with the band. Dino looks down at Helm and say, "Now you're swinging, dad," to which Matt makes a response about kids' slang these days. Matt's dancing partner, Suzie (Ann-Margret), then comments, "It's a wise son who knows his own father," and Helm returns with, "The way their wearing their hair nowadays, it's a wise father who knows his own son." This is yet another meta-joke to blur the line between Matt Helm and Dean Martin.

Murderers' Row is clearly too awesome for one post, and I haven't even gotten to Ann-Margret yet, so I'm going to save her for her own separate post tomorrow.

Meanwhile, here's an RC Cola ad featuring Dino, Desi, and Billy from around the same time as this movie:



I also want to link to a helpful article from Cinema Retro that discusses the Matt Helm movies in relation to the Donald Hamilton novels. The article also features some nice images. The novels are, of course, much more serious than the movies, and fans of the books were angered by the films' parodic tone.

Matt Helm Week: Interlude

First off, I just want to point out that I want to live in this world:

(Cover taken from Will Pfeifer's blog, who got it from If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger.)

I thought today that I'd include clips from Dean Martin's variety show to give readers who never got to experience it an understanding of just how the show operated. Here's a bit with Dino and John Wayne, who had just co-starred together in The Sons of Katie Elder:

Now, this bit was clearly not rehearsed at all. Dean responds to the jokes as if he's seeing them for the first time. Would it have been smoother if it were rehearsed? Yes. Would it have been better? Probably not. A big part of Dino's charm was his ability to laugh his way through the rough spots.

One of the highlights of this show was the way in which Dino and his guests would just crack each other up during sketches, which probably couldn't have happened if they had seen the scripts beforehand. Here's a wild sketch, with Jimmy Stewart, Dino, and Orson Welles at a Men's Hair Salon (Holy Crap!):



The joke about "Tab and Rock showing up" to a party "in identical blazers" is interesting, to say the least.

The feeling always was with this show that Dean was having a party, and you were invited. That's also the feeling I get from the Matt Helm movies as well, and that's what makes them so enjoyable.

Matt Helm Week Day 1: The Silencers!

Before I get started on The Silencers, I just want to clear up one thing about yesterday's post: I am by no means critical of Dean Martin's work ethic. In fact, I aspire to it. No one has had more influence on my own work ethic and pedagogy as Dino has had. I look forward to the day that I can walk into a classroom, randomly open up a literature book, and begin talking cold about a poem that I've never laid eyes on before. WWDD?

The Silencers opens, after the fantastic credit sequence I posted yesterday, with a scene we find common to later Matt Helm movies: Helm must be stirred from his playboy lifestyle and his fashion photographer cover to once again enter the espionage game for his government employers, ICE (Intelligence and Counter-Espionage).

In this case, he must be woken from the verge of a nocturnal emission (or in Matt Helm's case, more like an afternoonal emission):

Although this is a (wet) dream, at other points in the movie, when Matt is contemplating his mission, we hear Dean singing standards, but with new lyrics pertaining to the film's plot. Therefore, we are to assume that Matt Helm's interior monologue consists entirely of songs, which makes perfect sense.

In this scene, we also get to see that Matt Helm has the least efficient high-tech spy pad ever created. The rotating, motorized, pneumatic bed is one thing, but he also uses large, pulsing velour rods to dry off from the unnecessarily large bubble bath.

We are also introduced here to Helm's secretary, Lovey Kravezit--an employee for whom Matt just learns her first name despite the fact that she apparently does most of her work naked in his bubble bath.

There is, in fact, too much awesomeness to comment on in this scene.

The plot of this movie is relatively inconsequential. Helm's constant nemeses, The BIG O--led here by Victor "King Tut" Buono as "Tung-Tse"--plan something called "Operation Fallout" to disrupt some underground nuclear test in the Southwest by redirecting an American missle and blah blah blah.

Helm is reluctantly drawn back into the game when BIG O sends a female assassin after him. Helm returns to his pad to find a trail of women's clothes leading to his bedroom. Apparently, this is a common enough occurence for Helm that he is nonplussed by it. Helm assumes she comes from ICE as a means to entice him into the mission, and he explains that he has already taken a photography assignment to Acupulco.

"What's in Acupulco that you can't find here?" she asks, as she wraps herself around him.

"Mexicans," Helm responds, in a joke that is even funnier today (to Republicans).

In addition to having the least efficient spy pad, Matt Helm also gets the most useless gadgets. In The Silencers, his gadgets include a gun that shoots backwards so that it kills the person pulling the trigger and a sportcoat with giant buttons that function as grenades when they are pulled off. Both of these are rife with the potential to do more harm to the user than good.

And neither are as crazy or as awesome as the belt that turns into a sword when it gets wet, which we will see in a later movie.

In the course of the movie, Helm picks up Stella Stevens, who is a witness to the BIG O's plot and a potential double agent. In this scene, Helm tries to interrogate her while they drive to the site of BIG O's project, and we get to see just how much Helm's station wagon beats the shit out of any car James Bond has ever driven:

In this scene, we get two common tropes that reappear in later Matt Helm movies. First, the drinking and driving, which occurs with a frequency that is both alarming and entertaining. Second, the postmodern, metatextual gag where Matt Helm disses Frank Sinatra in favor of Dean Martin. We are to assume from these gags that Matt Helm exists in a world where there is also a Dean Martin, and that is a world that is too awesome to contemplate without causing an innercranial explosion.

Also, Stella Stevens is pretty hot here, though her character, Gail Hendricks, gets treated terribly throughout the movie, in ways that might, honestly, make some modern viewers uncomfortable. As everyone should know, Stevens also starred with Dino's former partner, Jerry Lewis, in the classic The Nutty Professor. According to Stevens, her appearance in The Silencers just a few years after costarring in The Nutty Professor led to Jerry shutting her out for over twenty years.

Next: The best of the Matt Helm movies--Murderers' Row.

Coming Soon! Matt Helm Week!

This week on the Spec, I'll be posting a series of entries on the most ridiculously awesome spy movie series of the 60s: The Matt Helm movies starring Dean Martin.

The four films--The Silencers, Murderers' Row, The Ambushers, and The Wrecking Crew--were released over the course of three years (1967-69) during the height of the James Bond craze. While they lack much of the quality that many spy movies of the period had, they make up for that by being contagiously fun. Dean Martin functions here in the mode that he followed for his tv series: he clearly isn't trying very hard, and most of the time he's reading his lines off of cue cards, but his personality carries him a long way. And the films do a great job of playing off the hard-partying persona he developed during this period of his career.

In fact, a lot of Dean Martin purists dislike these movies because he seems to be wasting his talents. However, I always felt that one of Dean's many talents--and perhaps his most endearing one--was that he never seemed to work harder than he had to. So, while he certainly could act, as he proved in The Young Lions, Some Came Running, Rio Bravo, and elsewhere, his talents were such that he could easily coast on his personality alone. Plus, he gets to sing a lot in these movies.

The movies also benefit from having some incredible leading ladies, including Ann-Margret, Sharon Tate, Stella Stevens, Janice Rule, Senta Berger, Camilla Sparv, Elke Sommer, and Daliah Lavi.

Here's the great opening sequence from the first Matt Helm movie, The Silencers. The music is by Elmer Bernstein, who may be slumming a bit here. Cyd Charisse performs the theme song.

This sequence captures the feeling of unbridled hedonism that these movies all celebrate. When the stripper opens her top to reveal the film's title, you know exactly what you're going to get.

And the line, "And she's 38 where it is great to measure 38"--I really don't know what to say about that, except it makes me happy.

The opening credit sequence for the second film, Murderers' Row, features music by Lalo Schifrin. The music may be better here, but the sequence contains less stripping. The design resembles a more generic 60s spy movie style than the earlier movie does, too.


So, tomorrow we'll start Matt Helm Week off with The Silencers.